Congress’s Piracy Blacklist Plan: A Cure Worse than the Disease?

Over at TIME.com Techland, [I write about](http://techland.time.com/2011/11/07/congresss-piracy-blacklist-plan-a-cure-worse-than-the-disease/#ixzz1d2N0w6fg) the newly introduced Stop Online Piracy Act and the renewed push for a “rogue website” law.

>At a moment when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is urging world governments to keep their hands off the Internet, creating a blacklist would send the wrong message. And not just to China or Iran, which already engage in DNS filtering, but to liberal democracies that might want to block information they find naughty. Imagine if the U.K. created a blacklist of American newspapers that its courts found violated celebrities’ privacy? Or what if France blocked American sites it believed contained hate speech? We forget, but those countries don’t have a First Amendment.

>The result could be a virtually broken Internet where some sites exist for half the world and not for the other. The alternative is to leave the DNS alone and focus (as the bills also do) on going after the cash flow of rogue websites. As frustrating as it must be for the content owners who are getting ripped off, there are some cures worse than the disease.

Jerry Brito / Jerry is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and director of its Technology Policy Program. He also serves as adjunct professor of law at GMU. His web site is jerrybrito.com.